Did you know that Gartner predicts 85% of the world’s organizations will utilize cloud platforms by 2025?
Because cloud platforms help businesses rapidly scale their services, seamlessly integrate their teams, tighten security measures, and reduce infrastructure costs, it’s no wonder that 57% of businesses have already migrated their resources to the cloud in 2022. With the announcement that 25% of North America’s employees will permanently work from home, even more businesses are migrating their data to the cloud.
This begs the question, what should the remaining 43% of businesses do if they want to migrate their resources to the cloud?
In this article, we will walk you through a process so you can strategize how to utilize cloud services for your business.
Before you select a cloud platform to use, you must determine the scope of your needs. If you do not have a large existing IT infrastructure, this will be a simple process. Alternatively, if you have a working IT framework, this will require more planning. You must determine which areas of your infrastructure need to be moved to the cloud first and scaffold the rest of your infrastructure according to your business’s priorities.
It may be helpful to ask yourself what your purposes are for utilizing the cloud. These may include:
There are multiple cloud services on the market, each with its own pros and cons. Some cloud platforms are geared toward a specific industry, while others are easily applicable to any organization.
Depending on the scope of your needs and the type of infrastructure you have in place, selecting your platform and migrating to the cloud can be a relatively simple or a highly complex process. If you are in the beginning stages of your start-up, you may not need an in-depth migration, so implementing cloud services like Dropbox of Office 365 can be easy.
However, if you’re an existing business that already has an IT framework in place, you will likely require the assistance of a managed service provider (MSP). An MSP can take care of migrating your data to the cloud and recommend long-term strategies to ensure a smooth experience for your customers and your team. They can share insights to help you prioritize the data to migrate to the cloud, determine a migration schedule, and advise which cloud platform you should purchase in light of your current infrastructure and future goals.
In addition to their FAQs section and help desk, cloud platforms will typically provide guides to assist you as you migrate your data to their particular platform. In the simplest terms, migrating your data requires you to gather and upload your data to the cloud (as well as create backups to enhance security). However, doing so can cost quite a bit of time, energy, and dollars, so a more efficient—and stress-free—option is to hire an MSP to take care of this for you.
Once the data migration is completed, you’re not done yet. You will want to ensure that everything was uploaded properly and that your cloud is secure. This means organizing and encrypting your data within the cloud, applying the appropriate user access to all of your employees, and training your team so everyone can reap the full benefits of the cloud’s capabilities.
Without a doubt, the cloud is a robust tool that can definitely help you as you scale your business and maximize your IT department. By understanding your current needs and future goals, crafting a migration strategy, selecting and implementing your cloud platform, and optimizing the cloud for your business, you can create the context for a readily scalable, integrated, and remote-friendly organization.
While there are many guides and articles—including this one—that provide an overview of how you can migrate your data to the cloud, 20% of businesses admit that they do not have the skills required to successfully transfer their data. This is why partnering with a premier MSP, like Core12, to migrate and manage your cloud hosting can radically transform your business’s capabilities and productivity.
If you want to learn more about cloud migration solutions or cloud management, contact us here!
Core12 is an Atlanta-based IT services provider dedicated to helping small businesses improve the way they work. As a specialized IT Support firm, we provide our clients with the personal, detail-oriented service that they deserve but seldom receive.
887 W Marietta Street NW Suite N101Atlanta, GA 30318
